ICDDR,B is spreading its technical know-how to African countries to help them overcome tropical diseases.
Two doctors of the organization who are also experts in cholera management, returned home on Wednrsday after a two-week visit to the Horn of African countries-including Somalia and Kenya.
They trained more than 50 health professionals there including doctors and nurses, in cholera case management.

Two ICDDR,B doctors, also experts in cholera management, returned home Wednesday after a two-week visit to the Horn of African countries —Somalia and Kenya — where they trained more than 50 health professionals, including doctors and nurses, in cholera case management.
Heavy rainfall caused increased fears of a wide- scale cholera outbreak in an already volatile region marred by warfare and subsequent breakdown in basic infrastructure and services.

A tsunami alert was issued in Maldives yesterday after Indonesia’s geophysical agency reported a powerful earthquake off Banda Aceh province.
Wednesday’s quake was measured at a preliminary 8.9-magnitude. The geophysical agency said it had not received reports of damage from Aceh quake or rise in water levels.
Tremors were felt in the capital Male’ and the islands. There were reports that high-rise buildings and offices Male’ and the islands shook for at least seven minutes.

Famine is over in war-torn Somalia but the problems are not: Haweyo Ibrahim survives on meagre food aid handouts rather than return to her village, controlled by Shebab rebels who killed her husband.

‘Until the Shebab leave, I cannot go back,’ 40-year old Ibrahim said, queuing for food aid handouts in the anarchic Somali capital Mogadishu.

‘I cannot go back to where they murdered my husband,’ she added quietly.

The United Nations said on Friday that the famine that has killed tens of thousands of people in Somalia this past year has ended, thanks to a bumper harvest and a surge in emergency food deliveries.

But conditions are still precarious, United Nations officials warned, with many Somalis dying of hunger and more than two million still needing emergency rations to survive.

“The crisis is not over,” said José Graziano da Silva, director general of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, who just returned from Somalia.

An exceptional harvest after good rains and food deliveries by aid agencies have ended famine in Somalia although conditions remain fragile and could worsen, the United Nations said on Friday.

The U.N. declared famine in two parts of southern Somalia last July and extended the famine warning in September to six out of eight regions in the anarchic Horn of Africa country.

The World Health Organization on Friday warned that Europe faces an explosion of measles cases next year unless it takes urgent steps to contain the viral respiratory disease.

In the first nine months of 2011, 36 Western European nations reported a total of 26,000 measles cases, including more than 14,000 in France alone, according to the WHO's latest data.

There were nine deaths, six in France, as well as 7,288 hospitalizations.

Global warming already is causing suffering and conflict in Africa, from drought in Sudan and Somalia to flooding in South Africa, President Jacob Zuma said on Monday, urging delegates at an international climate conference to look beyond national interests for solutions.

“For most people in the developing countries and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death,” said the South African leader as he formally opened a two-week conference with participants from more than 190 nations.

The drought-induced famine crisis in Somalia has eased somewhat, United Nations officials said on Friday, with the number of people facing imminent starvation dropping to nearly 250,000 from 750,000 because of rainfall and increased aid deliveries.